Understanding Immutable.Record

Functional programming principles and with it immutable data are changing the way we write frontend applications. If the recent de-facto frontend stack of React and Redux feels like it goes perfectly together with immutable data, that's because it's specifically designedfor that.

There's several interesting implementations of immutable data for JavaScript, but here I'll be focusing on Facebook's own Immutable.js, and specifically on one of its lesser known features, Records.

Why Records?

Immutable.js provides a beautiful, Clojure-inspired API for dealing with abstract Collections and Sequences, and several concrete data structur

Simple, semi-anonymous backups with S3 and curl

Backing stuff up is a bit of a hassle, to set up and to maintain. While full-blown backup suites such as duplicity or CrashPlan will do all kinds of clever things for you (and I'd recommend either for more complex setups), sometimes you just want to put that daily database dump somewhere off-site and be done with it. This is what I've done, with an Amazon S3 bucket and curl. Hold onto your hats, there's some Bucket Policy acrobatics ahead.

There's also a tl;dr at the very end if you just want the delicious copy-pasta.